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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25152973">Dawning</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkfinch/pseuds/darkfinch'>darkfinch</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Dawning [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Leverage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Non-Graphic Torture, Out-Of-Context usage of Biblical Quotes for Aesthetic Purposes, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 03:42:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,602</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25152973</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkfinch/pseuds/darkfinch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>How it starts is simple: He’s bleeding. He’s just killed three people. And someone hands him a business card for the devil. </p><p>Or: Eliot meets Damien Moreau. Things get complicated.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Damien Moreau &amp; Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau/Eliot Spencer, The Concept Of Devotion/Eliot Spencer, kinda? - Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Dawning [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915399</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>137</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Dawning</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>How it starts is simple.</p><p>He’s bleeding. He’s just killed three people. And someone hands him a business card for the devil. </p><p>He hasn’t been paid nearly enough for any of this, and he won't remember what country it happened in when he tries to think back on it in a few years’ time—there have been so many countries, and so much blood—but he’ll remember the clean white edges of that business card, burned into his mind like so many muzzle flashes. </p><p>“Impressive,” says a man wearing black leather gloves, who introduces himself as Dietrich. Dietrich, who has a face like a fox, is here to kill one of the dead men at Eliot’s feet. The whole thing has happened very quickly. “Very impressive. My employer could use someone with talent like yours.” And he hands him the card.</p><p>He <em> will </em> remember that part later, the phrasing, that the man behind the dark numbers printed on that card is going to use him. But so has his country, and so has the woman who hasn’t paid him enough for the trouble he’s just gone through, and he’s cold and he’s tired and he needs the money, so he dials the number from his hotel room six hours later. </p><p>“Who is this?” Asks a voice like cool water.</p><p>“Eliot Spencer.”</p><p>“How did you get this number, Eliot Spencer?”</p><p>“The—a man gave it to me. Dietrich. On a business card. Said there might be work.”</p><p>“Work?” The man on the other end sighs, like he’s bored, like this is a waste of his time, and a little spark of anger lights up along Eliot’s spine. “What sort of work are you looking for, exactly?”</p><p>“I think you’d know better’n I would,” says Eliot, shifting the ice pack he’s holding to his ribs. “I was told to call for work. I’m calling. You picked up.” </p><p>There’s a long, prickling silence. And then Damien Moreau begins to laugh.</p><p>“Alright, Eliot Spencer,” he says. “Do you have a pen? Paper? Good. Write down this address.” There’s the sound of the ocean behind his voice. “Be there in four hours.”</p><p>And, just like that, he finds himself working for a different boss in a different country and killing different people (and bleeding, still, always bleeding.)</p><p>It works like this: Damien Moreau gives him an address, and Damien Moreau’s dark-windowed car comes to pick him up and whisk him away to a city he’s never heard of in a country he’s never seen. The man in the backseat smells like a cigar box and doesn’t introduce himself. He knows everything there is to know about Eliot Spencer. He points him at a target—no name, no reason, just a face and a location and a price—and Eliot does what he’s good at. </p><p>The next morning, there’s a different man in a different car, and he’s loaded onto a private jet like precious stolen cargo. </p><p><em> If this gets me killed, </em> he thinks, sipping scotch he can’t afford and watching mile after mile of clear blue water stretch past, <em> at least I'll’ve been fuckin’ comfortable for once.  </em></p><p>
  <em> ** </em>
</p><p>Moreau’s villa is bigger than any house he’s ever set foot in. It’s one of many, he’s told. There are butlers and bodyguards and women in bikinis and Eliot, who has been sleeping in motels under fake names (and barracks, before that, and bare hard ground) for longer than he cares to think about, feels his head spin a little. He’s led straight to Moreau’s office, a tall-ceilinged room lined with dark wooden bookshelves, and meets the man who owns San Lorenzo. </p><p>“Eliot Spencer,” says Moreau. He is tall and his smile is sharp and his eyes are very dark, and he shakes Eliot’s hand like he owns him already. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” </p><p>Eliot counts the stolen artifacts in the office alone, and wonders what the hell he's getting into. </p><p>**</p><p>So, some men like to watch people suffer.</p><p>Eliot has never been that guy, not unless he’s pushed into it; he knows a good fight should be balanced, like a good knife or a good meal. It’s the dance of it, is what he likes; anticipating what his opponent is going to do, seeing it in their movements, countering it before they’re even all the way through thinking about it. Even likes getting hit, once in a while, so long as he gets to hit back (and if he’s outnumbered...well. That’s like Christmas). </p><p>And, sure, there’s something primal and satisfying in a well-placed fist, flesh cracking into flesh; in that sharp glint of fear in someone’s eyes when they know what’s coming for them—if he lets the monster that lives under his skin get a little too close to the surface, that is.  He can admit it, that he likes that. He can admit it. But a sadist, he’s never been; he doesn’t like hurting people who can’t hurt him back. </p><p>Chapman, though. Chapman likes to watch people suffer. </p><p>On his third night working for Damien Moreau, Eliot is shaken from a dead sleep. It’s Dietrich—who is, it turns out, Moreau’s head of security, and not that bad a guy to grab a beer with—crouching there in the dark, putting a finger to his lips in that universal gesture of <em>do not make a fucking sound</em>, motioning for him to get dressed. </p><p>Eliot does this very calmly, he thinks, for someone who’s maybe about to be led out back and shot like a lame horse. He’s taken to the courtyard. He maps their route and counts the exits and listens to the steady <em>thump-thump, thump-thump </em>of his own heart drumming in his ears. There are three figures waiting for him: Chapman, a man Eliot has disliked from the moment he first saw him on pure unfettered instinct (it’s the eyes. He’s got flat eyes, like a shark, like a corpse); a thin-faced man Eliot doesn’t recognize; and a tall guy he knows is named Almasi.</p><p>They’re to run an errand with Chapman, Dietrich tells them. It’s a test. It’s pass-fail. They leave the villa in one of Moreau’s dark-windowed cars and drive until the sun starts to peer between the palm trees, thin and watery and half-awake; until the houses start getting smaller and farther apart. More hills, fewer people.</p><p>“Where are we going?” The thin-faced man asks, about forty-five minutes in. They’ve made eight lefts and a handful of rights, not in that order; the roads here are too winding for Eliot to make a proper map and the car is getting smaller by the second.</p><p>“To kill a cop,” says Chapman.</p><p>Eberardo Zetticci is fifty-three years old. He lives in the kind of small, warm house Eliot’d always coveted for himself, back when the edges of his world were marked by state lines and his hands were still clean. He has a daughter in high school and a wife who runs a charity, and he is one of the only cops in the area to refuse Damien Moreau’s money. He’s a good man. Eliot watches Chapman pick him apart like a carrion bird.</p><p>It’s a message, is what they’re sending, and Chapman smiles and smiles with his flat dead eyes, and asks them to take turns carving it into whatever they can reach of the man. Four hours later, Zetticci is still alive, because they know what they’re doing. He doesn’t want to be. The room smells like blood and piss and Eliot takes the knife when asked, takes the hammer when asked, listens to the man beg and doesn’t lift a finger to end his suffering. It’s a test, and it’s the kind that tells him as much about the man giving it as it does about himself. </p><p><em> This is what he’ll ask of you</em>, sings the hammer as it flies. <em> This is what you’re capable of</em>, sings the crack of bone. Eliot takes the hammer, and takes the knife, and takes the hammer, and walks back to the car in the heat of mid-morning with his boots caked in blood. </p><p>The thin-faced man does not take the hammer. Eliot is ducking into the sheltering dark of the car when he hears it: a <em> pop-pop </em>from inside the house— <em> 9 mil, Beretta, probably a 92FS— </em> clean and sharp like the cork from a champagne bottle<em>. </em>Chapman and Almasi come back to the car alone, and they drive back to the villa in silence.</p><p>**</p><p>The next day, Moreau asks him to hurt someone. And the next. And the next. And Eliot does. </p><p>**</p><p>They’re a kaleidoscope of traitors, Moreau’s men. CIA, MI6, Mossad, every goddamn branch of the US military. Russian, Chinese, American, Iranian. He takes a shift guarding a cocktail party with a guy who walks like Secret Service, and doesn’t ask, because he doesn’t want to know. The canapés are free and good, if you can grab ‘em when no one’s looking. </p><p>**</p><p>Damien—he’s told Eliot to call him Damien, now, sometimes, when there’s no one around he needs to posture for—gets quiet when he’s angry. Up ‘til now, Eliot’s only known this from watching him round on other people; Eliot’s been good. He’s been careful. He’s had a moment of blinding idiocy and has now stopped being both good and careful. It’s his very first mistake, his only sin since he’s arrived, and his clean record doesn’t matter, not even a little; he finds himself standing in Moreau’s office, guilty and staring down the metaphorical barrel, and isn’t sure how he got there.</p><p>The man is pacing. Eliot’s stomach is full of writhing snakes. </p><p>“How could you possibly fuck this up?” Moreau asks him, and Eliot feels very, very small. It’d been a simple order. Go to a house, make someone suffer, come back. He’d taken Chapman and Almasi and planned to make it quick. Until he’d seen his target.</p><p>“The man’s eighty goddamn years old, Damien, I couldn’t just—”</p><p>“Did I ask you how old he was?” Moreau stops pacing, suddenly, momentum dissipating like he’d never been moving in the first place. His voice is a rattlesnake hiss. He is staring at Eliot like he’s never seen him before.</p><p>“No, but—” It’s his momma’s fault, he thinks wildly but doesn’t say. He’d been clinging to right and wrong, like a child, like she’d taught him, and he’d been <em> right </em> to call it off—</p><p>“Did I send you to his house and say, Eliot, tell me how old this man looks to you? No.” Eliot wants to keep his gaze on the floor, respectful, but he can’t tear his eyes away from Moreau’s hands where they’re gripping the edge of his desk, knuckles white like he wishes it were someone’s throat. </p><p>“No,” Moreau repeats, “I didn’t, and if I wanted your opinion, Spencer, I would’ve asked for it.” </p><p>Eliot’s throat is dry. His tongue is heavy. “I’m sorry.” </p><p>“You should be. And you’re not, not yet.” He sighs like he’s tired, and smiles at Eliot, and his eyes are bright and cold like glass. “You’re not. But you will be. You just need to learn.” </p><p>That night, Eliot learns. Five men drag him out of his bed and into the courtyard, into the pitch-black dark, and beat him bloody. He knows this violence, what it is and what it’s for, and he knows better than to fight back; he covers his head with his hands and waits for it to end.</p><p>“This isn’t the place for white knights,” Damien murmurs into his ear, later, after Eliot’s had the resistance bled out of him ‘til he’s empty and quiet. “I need you to remember that.” And Eliot does.</p><p>“Kill this man,” Damien says a week later, and gives him a name, and Eliot does. </p><p>“Hurt this one,” Damien says. “Remind him who I am.” And Eliot does, Eliot does, again and again and again, without a moment’s hesitation.</p><p>Eliot knocks on doors. Eliot hurts people in Damien’s name. “Mr. Moreau would like to speak with you,” he says, smiles while he’s doing it, drags them from their beds in the pitch-black dark and hurts them while their families watch. It comes more easily than he would’ve hoped.</p><p>**</p><p>In a few years’ time, Eliot will come back to San Lorenzo. He’ll have been dreaming of it since he left, carrying it with him, an ache in the core of him he can’t quite get rid of. He’ll have wanted it like a missing limb: the cherry-red heat of the sun; the palm trees rustling in the morning breeze like a lullaby he can’t quit singing in the back of his head, over and over, under the violence and the running and the fear; the ocean resting on the back of his tongue.</p><p>He’ll notice this first, stepping off the plane: the air in San Lorenzo always smells the same. Thick; sweet; fruit and sea and buttery sun. He’ll want to drink it. It’ll feel like nothing has changed.</p><p>It’ll feel like a march to the gallows and a homecoming, all at once.</p><p>**</p><p>They find Dietrich’s body just before sunrise. </p><p>It feels inevitable, and it also feels like something that never should have been possible. People die, working for Moreau. People are killed, working for Moreau. This isn’t one of those times. </p><p>It’s two clean taps to the back of the skull. </p><p>An execution. A declaration of war. They bury him in the courtyard before the heat gets to be too much. Eliot tears his hands open on the shovel and doesn’t really notice. </p><p>**</p><p>Moreau moves money for every morally-but-not-financially bankrupt entity on the planet, as far as Eliot can tell, which is why his security setup surprises him.</p><p>It’s shit, is the thing. It needs a complete overhaul, and Eliot is chosen to do it, because Eliot is good at patterns; he can tell from someone’s walk if they’re armed and where they were trained and how likely they are to do violence. He can tell what a gun for hire would do to get into this kind of building, because he’s been a gun for hire, and he’s been hired to do that exact thing more times than he can count. He knows how to think. Eliot is also chosen because he’s paranoid to his core, and Moreau, he thinks, can relate.</p><p>And, well. There’s been a job opening. </p><p>There’s a third reason Eliot is chosen, and he figures that out when Moreau offers him champagne after they’ve gone over the new placements for the security cameras. </p><p>“You insult me,” says Moreau, hand over his heart, smile playing over his lips, when Eliot declines. He doesn’t make a habit of drinking while he’s working. “Please.”</p><p>And Eliot caves—Moreau is as hard to say no to when he’s being friendly as he is when he’s being demanding— and takes a sip from the glass, and it’s bright and floral and sweet on his tongue. </p><p>“Thank you,” he offers, and Moreau’s dissecting eyes watch him intently for something. Whatever it is, he doesn’t find it.</p><p>“You don’t like it.” It’s less accusatory than Eliot’s expecting. More curious. Eliot shrugs and takes another sip.</p><p>“I prefer beer,” he says, and Moreau laughs—that same laugh he’d heard on the phone, the first time he’d heard the man’s voice; honeyed and surprised like it’s been knocked out of him. </p><p>“I like you, Eliot Spencer,” says Moreau, and that’s the third reason, Eliot knows.</p><p>**</p><p>It’s not the type of job he’s used to, personal security, but Eliot keeps up well enough. He’s always been a quick learner, and Moreau is there to teach him—<em> tame him</em>, he hears Chapman tell the others, smirking, like he’s something feral they’ve lured in with food and trapped here.</p><p>When you work next to Moreau, you wear a suit. (A proper suit, tailored, that costs more than his first car. Eliot doesn’t say that he doesn’t see the point; that he wears his clothes cheap ‘cause his job means they’ll get wrecked at some point, and it’s a waste. Moreau wants him to look nice, so he’ll look nice. It’s not <em>his</em> money.) You only sit when everyone else at the table has sat. You only make eye contact when you’re staring someone down, and you don’t talk, not ever, not loud enough for clients to hear.</p><p>He learns his new boss’ face. He learns which glance means <em>don’t do anything embarrassing </em>and which means <em>start breaking fingers</em>. Then, he learns which one means <em>are you seeing this shit—don’t laugh, but are you seeing it? </em> and which one means <em>you’ve done well, but don’t look too smug about it</em>. That’s his favourite, levelled across tables at meetings and over other people’s shoulders. </p><p>**</p><p>Chapman is, of course, pissed off to hell and back, having clawed his way up the ranks just to be told to follow Eliot. He is wound up tight with the singular, petty rage of a man made to train his own replacement. <em> Moreau’s dog, </em> he calls Eliot, lip curling. <em> That dumb hick</em>, he calls him. <em> Damien’s pet killer</em>. He calls him a lot of shit, actually, from just within earshot and just outside of hitting range. </p><p>Eliot has a reputation for his discretion, and professionalism, and ruthless efficiency. This is why, the first time he breaks Chapman’s nose, he does it in private. </p><p>(The second time, he does it in Damien’s office a year later, and Damien laughs like he’s told an off-colour joke, and Chapman looks at him like he can see his innards through his skin. It’s worth it.)</p><p>**</p><p>Moreau’s empire is growing like a twisting weed, healthy and consuming, when Eliot disobeys him for the second time.</p><p>“I don’t understand,” Damien says, even though he does. It’s mid-afternoon, July, and they’re in his mansion in Belize. “Almasi can follow orders. Whitman can follow orders. For fuck’s sake, Eliot, <em> Chapman </em>can follow orders. Why do you give me so much grief?” </p><p>It was a family. The father owed money, and the wife and the daughter and the son did not, and Eliot’d made an example out of them anyway. He’d just done it quicker than Damien would’ve liked. Cleaner.</p><p>“I don’t know,” he lies, and watches Damien’s hands where they grip his wine glass a little too tightly. “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“You’re not,” Damien snaps. And then, “Kneel.”</p><p>“I—what?” He blinks. He’s heard him wrong—</p><p>“Kneel,” says Damien, “right there, on the floor.” He gestures at the dark hardwood with his glass, eyes a little wild. “Just—fucking—just get on your knees and kneel and stay there until I can figure out what I’m going to do with you, alright? Just stay there.”</p><p>Eliot, God help him, does. </p><p>The back of his neck is hot and crawling and he knows his face is burning but he does it all the same, clasps his hands behind his back and sinks down to the floor like it’s not the most humiliating thing he’s done in front of the man. In front of most people. He stays there until his knees hurt, pins and needles and shrapnel and <em>ache</em>. His muscles shake. The sky outside the window turns red by way of pink, and Damien watches it, perched on the edge of his desk, drinking his wine.</p><p>“Alright,” Damien says, soft and low, when dusk arrives. “Alright.”</p><p>**</p><p>Damien has houses in Munich and Kyoto and Tel Aviv and Eliot follows him like a shadow to all of them. Of all of Chapman’s nicknames, <em> Moreau’s dog </em>is the one that sticks, because the universe hates Eliot; it grows and twists into others as it’s spoken by a hundred tongues in a hundred different languages. <em> Hellhound. The devil’s guard dog. </em>He sits at Damien’s side during negotiations and does his best to look the part. Damien gives him sly, dangerous looks from the corner of his eye when they both know he’s about to close a deal, like he’s letting him in on a joke, and it gives him a strange sort of thrill he can’t put a name to. Not equal footing, not ever— but a partnership, almost. </p><p>He’s the knife up Damien’s sleeve. He’s his red right hand.</p><p>Eliot has always had a sharp-fanged thing that lives in his chest, and Eliot has rage and ambition to spend, and Eliot stops six assassination attempts in his first year and a half. He was good before, but Damien hones him wicked-sharp, and he guards the man with a vicious enthusiasm that remakes him from the inside out. It feels like pride. It feels like purpose. Every broken bone, every bruise, every drop of blood is a message, and he writes it on every wall for the world to read: </p><p>
  <em> No one touches Damien Moreau.  </em>
</p><p>**</p><p>The pool is too cold. They’ve waded into it anyway, a careful distance apart, to watch the light fade from the sky. There’s a bloodstain on the deck from Eliot’s morning conversation with one of their former account managers, and Damien has spent the better part of the evening trying to get it out; he’s since given up, declaring it hopeless. It’s strange, Eliot thinks, seeing Damien barefoot with his shirtsleeves rolled up, cursing and scrubbing at the wood. He seems smaller, like this.</p><p>The chlorine is sharp in his nose.</p><p>“You’re important to me,” Damien tells him, apropos of absolutely nothing. Eliot, whose knuckles are so split and bruised and swollen from his work this week that he can’t open his hands fully, let alone focus on anything else, has no idea what to say to that. </p><p>Later, Damien smiles, and doesn’t offer him champagne; he’s found the best kinds of beer that money can buy, smooth and complex and too nice for someone like Eliot to drink. </p><p>“This’s sorta wasted on me,” he warns, rubbing the back of his neck. Damien doesn’t seem to agree; he watches him intently as he tries each one, and seems to like what he finds there, this time. </p><p>**</p><p>If he had known the kneeling was going to become a Thing, he probably would’ve told Damien to go to Hell the first time, damn the consequences, which would have been both very smart of him and also a colossal shame. The kneeling is a fucking formative experience for him, it turns out.</p><p>They’re in San Lorenzo again, a reunion after two weeks apart. Eliot has been solving Damien’s problems and Damien has been pulling new ones out of thin air, shady business deals and threats to his life and fresh scores that need settling. It’s Tuesday. Eliot has done something to annoy his boss. The air is hot and sweet and thick and he can’t quite remember what it is anymore, this thing he’s done. His knees feel like static. His legs ache. He’s gripping his wrist behind his back hard enough to bruise. </p><p>“Aren’t you tired?” Damien asks, and his voice rolls over Eliot’s skin, warm, warm, warm. “All this defiance. All this wasted energy. And for what? Aren’t you tired, Eliot?” And he is, he is, he’s worn down to the bone— </p><p>“No,” he grits out between clenched teeth. Then, “Yes. Maybe.” </p><p>Damien laughs and he feels it in his gut. </p><p>“Tell me,” he orders, perched easily on his desk, sun lighting him up from behind like a halo of fire. “Tell me about this hurdle you’re trying to jump.”</p><p>“I’m—” He can’t remember what he’s being asked. Time is stretching syrup-thick.</p><p>“Tell me, Eliot. It’s alright. You defy me and you learn and you defy me, and I teach you again.” He sips his wine. “Why do you defy me?”</p><p>“It’s...I can’t always—it’s—” He swallows. “Deciding who’s gonna die, who—hurting people. Pulling the trigger. Knowing they don’t—they might not deserve it, thinking about that, doing it anyway. It’s just—I’m just—” Eliot’s nails are digging into his skin and he thinks he might be bleeding, now, heat trickling down his wrist. He wants an end. He wants—</p><p>“I understand,” says Moreau. “You’re still holding onto that. That’s okay.” Then, “You don’t have to.”</p><p>And it feels like forgiveness. It feels like a gun taken out of his hands. </p><p>“I don’t?” He doesn’t recognize his own voice. </p><p>Damien’s finger is tilting up his chin. Damien’s eyes are boring into his. Eliot can’t breathe. </p><p>“I’ll decide for you,” he says, and his smile is soft, and his eyes are blazing with something Eliot can’t name. “You just do what I tell you to. I’ll decide. We’ll make it easy.” </p><p><em> Oh</em>, thinks Eliot.</p><p>He’s on his knees and bleeding and Moreau’s hand on the back of his neck—steady, steady, firm, always—isn’t love, but it’s something like it, it’s something close.</p><p>**</p><p>For all his velvet-lined elegance and viper-quick wit, Damien has callouses on his hands. He has shrapnel scars all along his spine, scattered like freckles and broken glass. Almasi tries to kill him, and when he fails and is then dragged to Damien’s office (money, he says, bleeding; it was for money, this treason), Eliot is standing at Damien’s side—but Damien pulls the trigger. </p><p>**</p><p>“There are things I won’t do for you,” Eliot says one night, one year later, voice low like maybe Damien won’t hear his confession over the dark and the sound of waves. They’re on the balcony; it’s been a slow day for business and violence alike, and their drinks are growing warm and sweating condensation onto the table between them. </p><p>Next to him—too close next to him, always just a touch too close—Damien lets out a surprised little laugh. Eliot imagines he can feel the soft huff of the man’s breath on his skin, warmer than the air, even, warmer than—</p><p>“<em>Won’t </em> doesn’t mean anything, Eliot.” Damien’s voice is made round and molten by the wine he’s been drinking.</p><p>Eliot risks a glance over at him, at his profile—sharp and dark, painted gold and black and red with the lingering sun—and wonders if anything means anything, then, at this point. He knows some things used to. A lot of things used to. He sips his beer in response and it feels like a surrender. </p><p>**</p><p>“Thank you,” the woman says, clutching at Eliot’s arm as he helps her up, because she doesn’t know he’s here to kill her. <em> Thank you. </em>Like he’s doing her a favour. He helps her with her groceries and leads her to her front door, and she lets him in, because she’s kind. </p><p>Her home is warm and there are pictures of her children on the mantle, and he stops, because he sees a version of himself there—short hair, football jersey, big smile—and doesn’t know what’s happening anymore. <em> What is this, </em> he asks her. <em> Who are you? </em> He looks at her again and it’s his momma standing there, now, beaming at him, eyes sparkling like she loves him. He can feel the knife, cool and still and deadly in his hand. His heart is beating a ragged tattoo. <em> What are you doing here? What are you doing here? </em> He knows what he’s been asked to do, knows he can’t turn back now, and suddenly there’s fear in her eyes—</p><p><em> Eliot?  </em> She asks. <em> Eliot? What are you doing? </em></p><p>And then it’s Aimee there under him, eyes wide like a spooked horse. The blade has slid between her ribs, gently, quiet, without his permission. </p><p><em> What if it were me? </em> She’s asking, blood bubbling up between her lips. His hands are coated in it, red and slick, his hands are around her throat, his hands—</p><p>He wakes up all at once, lungs heaving, skin too tight, on Damien Moreau’s couch. </p><p><em> Well,</em> he thinks viciously, scrubbing at his eyes, <em> it wasn’t you, was it? </em>And even if it had been, duty’d always seemed to come before love, with him, hasn’t it? </p><p>**</p><p>He’ll try to explain it to them later, the team he doesn’t have yet, years after all of this ends. </p><p>“Why did you do it?” Parker will ask him. Hardison will have found pictures, then, of the things he’s done, and they will have questions. </p><p>“Because he asked me to.” </p><p>“Did you like it?” Hardison, this time.</p><p>“No, 'course I didn’t <em>like </em>—I wasn’t—not when it was kids. No. Not when it was kids.”</p><p>“Then why did you do it? If you didn’t like it?”</p><p><em> Because it’s addictive, being good at something, </em> he could say. <em> Because it’s exhausting holding your own leash. </em>There’s a better answer, and he’ll be going in these same circles for the rest of his life, retracing the same path, ending up at the same place no matter what he does:</p><p>“Because he asked me to.”</p><p>**</p><p>When Eliot was seven, he’d broken his arm running around a neighbour's barn, jumping off of things he wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near. Pretending to be a cowboy, probably. Or a fighter jet. He can remember the exact moment he’d realized he was falling; the fear, the sharp-sick-tug of helplessness in his gut.</p><p>This feels like that.</p><p>“Please don’t ask me to do this,” Eliot says, hands shaking, staring blankly at the file on the table. His voice is brittle. His heartbeat is quick and his head is light and he thinks he might pass out. Damien picks up that <em>please</em>, he knows, twists it this way and that in his hand, watches how it glitters in the light. <em> Please, please, please</em>. </p><p>“But will you do it?” Damien asks. He sips his scotch and watches Eliot from the corner of his eye. “If I ask you to?”</p><p><em> No</em>, thinks Eliot. <em> No, I won’t. I can’t. I couldn’t</em>. It isn’t true. He wishes it were.</p><p>“Yes,” he says.</p><p>“Good,” says Damien, and that’s all there is to it.</p><p>The worst thing he does in his entire life, he does for Damien Moreau, and he does it well. He comes home and vomits ‘til he sees blood, in one of the villa’s many bathrooms, and it tastes like an ending.</p><p>**</p><p>The Worst Thing is killing him from the inside out. It’s grinding him down, bones into dust, body into pulp, will into nothing at all. He knows this, and Damien knows this, Eliot can tell; he doesn’t give Eliot work to do for three and a half weeks.</p><p>He brings him fancy beer to try, new foods, new clothes. Has them lie out in the sun together, on a secluded beach with blinding white sand. Damien runs his fingers through Eliot’s hair—lazily, easy like it doesn’t mean anything—and tells him stories about Croatia, about the beginning of an empire, and his voice sounds cloudy and very far away. They watch the sky go blue-red-black.</p><p>He knows it’s sweltering because his body is sweating, and Damien sunburns the tops of his ears, but Eliot just feels cold. </p><p>**</p><p>“Spencer,” says General Flores, eyes wary, and it hits him like a bucket of ice water. Flores looks at him like he’s still a person, like he’s still that boy who dragged them both out of a warzone too many years ago, flag on his shoulder and God in his heart and whatever else he’s given up completely since then. The past three years crack and peel off his skin like old thick layers of paint, just like that, just from that look. He feels raw and small and seen.</p><p>They sit in Flores’ office, and drink scotch, and Eliot doesn’t kill him. This is the start and end of his problems.</p><p>**</p><p>So, Eliot leaves Moreau. The <em>why </em>is hazy, but the leaving is final. He does it quick-sure-fast like he’s breaking a neck.</p><p>He leaves Moreau, and manages to make it halfway across the city before he hears the sharp sweet <em>pop </em>of a sniper rifle, and bullets start to bury themselves like teeth into the buildings around him. He exits the country via three taxis and a commercial flight under a fake name. There is a man with a gun waiting for him at the baggage carousel, when he lands. He spends his first hours of freedom washing the blood out of his shirt in an airport bathroom. </p><p>Eliot’s plan isn’t a plan. It’s nausea and fear and the self-preservation mechanism in his brain finally switching itself back on and screaming <em>what the fuck have you been doing, Eliot? What the hell have you done</em>? </p><p>He puts as much distance between his body and Moreau and the person he’s turned into as he physically can, like maybe he can lose the monster under his skin by crossing a couple borders and an ocean or three.</p><p>He runs and hides and runs and hides and runs and none of it matters, none of it helps, not even a little bit; his phone rings and it’s Moreau. His cab driver looks back at him for a split second too long, and it’s Moreau. He wakes up in a cold sweat and it’s Moreau, it’s always Moreau, it has to be, because who’s ever left the man and lived long enough to brag about it? <em> Who is like the man? Who is able to make war with him? </em></p><p>He lies his way onto a Russian cargo ship slithering its way to Mogadishu, and he can still feel eyes at the back of his head and hot breath at the back of his neck and he wants to scream, or maybe break something, or maybe drag himself back to San Lorenzo and kneel. </p><p>Instead, he takes jobs. </p><p>He finds the ones who know his name, but not what’s following him. The name is enough, most of the time; “I’m Eliot Spencer,” he says, and it still sounds like <em> I’m the devil’s lapdog</em>, even without Moreau’s smooth voice in his ear<em>. </em> People are all too happy to use him for what they need, and he’s all too happy to be paid for it.</p><p>**</p><p>The window in his hotel room in Warsaw creaks as it’s pulled open, and he keeps a knife under his pillow, and he’s up and fighting before he’s even had time to recognize the faces. He knows what he’ll see there, anyway, in the light from the streetlamp outside: men he trained, men he lived with, men who have been sent to drag him back to Damien Moreau by the scruff of his neck. <em>Heel</em>, Damien will say, voice like cool water, fingers tilting up his chin. </p><p>Eliot doesn’t bother to hide the bodies when he’s done, just washes his hands and grabs his bag and picks another country to run to.</p><p>**</p><p>The first dozen jobs he takes are hits. It’s what he’s good at. </p><p>He pulls a trigger and watches a body drop like a puppet with the strings cut in Karachi, in Acapulco, watches a woman’s head snap backward with a spray of syrupy red in Maribor, and it’s fine until it isn’t. It’s fine until his ears won’t stop ringing and his brain won’t stop projecting snuff films onto the backs of his eyelids at night.<em> It will pursue you, </em> he thinks, staring up at the ceiling of his hotel room, not sleeping. Never sleeping. <em> Since you did not hate bloodshed, it will pursue you. </em></p><p>So, he trades his guns for knives, and his bare and capable hands. It’s easy, that trade, and he lies and tells himself it’s just part of the running (<em>no serial numbers, </em> he tells himself, no buyer to find, no bullets to trace back to him). And you can be more precise with a knife, can’t you? It’s smart, is all. It’s the first of a million changes.</p><p>Eliot picks up new habits. Eliot sleeps ninety minutes a day. Eliot checks his burner phone for bugs every three hours, like clockwork, like it’s normal; four months into running, Eliot buys a metal detector from an old man shuffling along a beach in a country he can’t remember the name of, and accidentally finds a tiny little microchip tucked into the corner of his suitcase, and never carries luggage again. </p><p>It’s fine. He’s worn paper-thin and his eyes ache from the lack of sleep and he’s never been more aware of his surroundings in his life, heart skipping a beat when a stranger glances at him for a split-second too long, adrenaline rushing forward in a tidal wave for nothing, but it’s fine. He’s free. He’s fine.</p><p>**</p><p>The floor outside his room in Kandahar creaks and he’s scrambling out the window, blind with panic, before he can even fully wake up. </p><p>**</p><p>It occurs to him, scrubbing blood out from under his fingernails in a shitty hotel room somewhere in Kolkata, that he doesn’t want to do this anymore. That maybe that cold, gritty feeling that curdles in his stomach and camps out there for days every time he takes a life isn’t something he just has to <em>push through</em>. </p><p>Killing’s still killing, it turns out, no matter whose name you’re doing it in, and his hands haven’t been clean since long before he met Moreau—won’t ever be clean—but there’s no reason he can’t quit adding more blood to the problem while he has the chance. </p><p>The next dozen jobs he takes are retrievals, and so are the dozen after that, and he discovers with a light kind of giddiness that he’s good at it. He’s really, really good at it, finding unfindable things in unreachable places and stealing knick-knacks from assholes with private islands. It won’t ever be redemption, but it feels like balance, at the very least.</p><p>**</p><p>It’s slow work, trying to redraw his old lines in the sand from memory, trying to get the beast in his chest used to being on a leash again—<em>be angry</em>, he thinks, <em> be angry and do not sin</em>—and he comes close to slipping once or twice. <em>Let me, let me, let me,</em> it sings, asks for blood, cuts him into ribbons and makes him crave the ease of giving up and giving in. <em>No</em>, he says, like he's relearning the meaning of the word. Slow work. Slow, slow work.</p><p>Eliot's always been good at discipline, though. Denial as ritual. He makes a list of rules and tells it to the ceiling when he can’t sleep: No kids, never again. No hits. No guns. Just him and his hands doing just enough damage that he can still live with himself after, if he tries, for a little while.</p><p>He never stops feeling eyes on the back of his head.</p><p>**</p><p>Here is where Eliot makes the worst mistake of his life:</p><p>He gets comfortable. </p><p>He learns to cook and feel and be a person. He joins a team (one job, they all say, just the one job, and he blinks and they're family and he's screwed). He puts little braids in his hair because he likes to, wears jewelry because he likes to; decorates his body because he likes to—because it’s more than just a tool, he doesn’t say, because it’s part of his being and he can decide what to do with it. He keeps tabs on his demons, but doesn’t obsess over them.</p><p>Parker pokes him in the ribs, and he makes fun of Hardison, and he watches Sophie’s acting and suffers like he’s never suffered before, spiritually, at that. He learns to follow Nate. He learns to trust Nate.</p><p>And then. And then, and then, and then.</p><p>“She wants us to take down Damien Moreau,” Nate says, and Eliot’s world comes crashing down around his ears. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading! This is just...hopelessly self-indulgent. I treasure all comments and kudos and hope you're staying safe out there.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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